GeForce GTX 1080 Ti: Founders Edition Graphics Card Review

The Beast has arrived.

By Matthew D. Sarrel

Nvidia recently unveiled its newest top-of-the-line gaming GPU, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and it blows away any other GPU I've ever tested. I'm affectionately naming the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti “The Beast” because of the way it tore through demanding graphics workloads with ease. The GTX 1080 Ti relies on 12 billion transistors, 3584 CUDA cores, and 11GB of memory to pump out the highest performance of any Nvidia GPU produced to date. The company says that the GTX 1080 Ti is built for 5K resolution and beyond, and my testing at 4K shows that The Beast can handle it. Let's take a look at the card, the specs, then dive in, shall we?

Striking Style

Simply stated, the GTX 1080 Ti is the highest performance Ti card NVIDIA has ever produced. NVIDIA claims that the 1080 Ti yields a 35% performance improvement over the GTX 1080, which is up from the 980 Ti’s 25% improvement over the 980 and the 780 Ti’s 18% improvement over the 780. Also, in the past the Ti versions of the x80 have always been a tiny bit slower than the Titan GPUs also, but this time around Nvidia is claiming the 1080 Ti is actually faster than the Titan X Pascal. This is a bold claim from Nvidia, but as you can see from the spec chart the two GPUs are almost identical. The only differences between the Titan X Pascal and the 1080 Ti are that the new GPU has 1GB less memory, eight less ROPs, and a slightly narrower memory bus. However, it makes up for the difference by using faster memory and higher clock speeds. As far as the missing 1GB of memory goes, Nvidia says 11GB is more than enough for 5k gaming, so it should be enough for quite awhile.

I tested a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Founders Edition provided by NVIDIA. The Founders Edition cards are built with premium materials and components and feature a die cast aluminum body. It’s overall a clean look and exactly what I’ve come to expect from NVIDIA. The card is engineered for maximum cool, and maximum cooling. The GTX 1080 Ti will be offered in both Founder's Edition and partner boards from Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, et al, and unlike the GTX 1080 launch, this time both versions of the card will cost the same at $699.

To cool the GP102 GPU Nvidia uses a copper vapor chamber combined with a large dual-slot aluminum heatsink. Heat is exhausted off the chip through the back of the card and out of the PC chassis, aka a "blower" style cooler. The DVI connector has been removed from the back of the card in order to provide a larger exhaust. According to Nvidia this results in double the airflow over previous versions. Our overclocked card ran quite hot and we recorded temperatures up to 60 degrees Celsius on the exposed back of the card. The card also includes a grooved backplate that can be removed with two GeForce GTX 1080 Ti cards are paired in SLI to improve airflow and cooling.

The Beast is Built for Speed

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is built with 3584 CUDA Cores, 28 Steaming Multiprocessors (SMs), and runs at a base clock frequency of 1480 MHz while it can be boosted to 1582 MHz. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti uses 224 texture units to provide a whopping 354.4 Gigatexels/sec texture filtering rate when overclocked. For comparison to the last gen, that's 85% higher than the GTX 980 Ti, if you can believe that.

Another performance improvement is the addition of GDDR5X memory modules running at 11Gbps. This is a bit faster than the modules in both the Titan X and the GTX 1080, which both run at 10Gb/s. When combined with the GTX 1080 Ti’s 352-bit memory interface, peak memory bandwidth maxes out at an incredible 484 GB/s. To further improve memory performance, NIVIDIA uses Tile Caching, which first appeared in the Maxwell architecture, to improve cache locality and reduce memory traffic. The combination of tile caching and compression techniques almost triples the effective memory bandwidth of the GTX 1080 Ti.

Benchmarks

To test the GTX 1080 Ti, I installed it in a test system IGN built that's comprised of an Intel Core i5 4670K @ 3.40GHZ, 8GB of RAM, and a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB running 64-bit Windows 10. We tested on an Acer XB280HK 4K monitor and ran all games and benchmarks in full screen mode. In all of my tests I ran the games at 3840x2160 resolution and maxed out graphics quality, running settings labeled as Very High, Ultra, Extreme etc. Though I didn't have a bunch of older Nvidia GPUs to compare it to, I was able to secure an overclocked MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G, which is a very good representation of what the fastest GTX 1080s are capable of doing. I didn't include benchmark results for the GTX 1070, since they were taken on a different system with an older driver, but you can examine them here for reference.

The Beast kicked ass and took no prisoners, even though we only tested it on a moderately equipped gaming PC. The GTX 1080 Ti blew away any other single card we’ve tested, and not just as an incremental improvement. It felt like The Beast was taunting us as we performance tested it, slowly raising its hand and extending a vertical palm as if to say to our massive and overclocked reference card, “oh please”.

Heaven 4.0 results were insane, almost doubling the performance of the Titan X (Maxwell) and beating the GTX 1080 by more than 25%. At 4K resolution, the GTX 1080 Ti ripped through Heaven 4.0 at 51.2 FPS, dropping to a minimum of 8 FPS and hitting a whopping maximum of 122.6 FPS. Dropping the resolution in Heaven 4.0 to a mere 2560x1600, The Beast shredded Heaven 4.0 at 119.5 FPS (min of 32.5 FPS and max of 258.3 FPS). We continued to see a 25%-plus improvement over the GTX 1080 in all our testing.

The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti handled everything I threw at it with aplomb. Gaming with it was a treat. Rise of the Tomb Raider was a completely fluid experience with all graphics options maxed out, even at 4k resolution. The shadows, lighting, and particle effects were enthrallingly smooth. Likewise, Batman: Arkham Knight was an epic visual adventure that brought detailed textures and lighting to bear with remarkable fluidity and grace.

Overclocking

At the press launch for the GTX 1080 Ti Nvidia stated that although the card's Boost Clock is a modest 1.6GHz, gamers could expect to hit 2GHz with some overclocking, so we tried our hand at it. Not surprisingly, I was able to hit 2GHz but it wasn't quite stable as I could see some artifacting flickering on the screen around 2012MHz. Going up to 20150MHz was possible but it caused the driver to crash every time, so I backed it down to 1,987MHz and it was very stable. The only fly in the ointment was it hit 84 degrees Celsius pretty quickly in testing so I had to turn up the fan a bit to get it to achieve a higher overclock, and the single fan in the blower-style cooler is loud. It's really the only knock on what is an otherwise flawless GPU, and it's one I'm sure Nvidia's partner's will rectify with two-and-three fan cooling setups. Though the Founder's Edition card ran very well overall, I can't help but think it'll be able to run at 2GHz much quieter with a beefier cooling apparatus.

Where To Buy

Because the GTX 1080 Ti is a brand new release, and because it takes claim as the fastest video card on the market, it's pretty hard to find it in stock as of this moment. Keep in mind that stores will be running in and out of stock for the first few weeks after release.

The Verdict

At $700/EUR650, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is expensive but its price almost lines up perfectly with the $525 GeForce GTX 1080, offering roughly 30% better performance for 33% more dollars. As far as a verdict goes, it's pretty simple; the GTX 1080 Ti is the fastest gaming graphics card available, by a wide margin, so there's not much nuance here. Though the Founder's Edition is well built and I was able to overclock it to 2GHz, I'd personally wait for one of Nvidia's partner's cards if you're in the market as they will assuredly offer better cooling performance and acoustics.